SDSU’S SHEPARD SUSPENDED THREE GAMES BY NCAA

That would take Shepard out of Saturday’s game at Missouri State and a Nov. 21 home date against Arkansas-Pine Bluff. In the meantime, he is allowed to practice and participate in other team functions except travel.

The NCAA rule is intended to prevent athletes from receiving money or favors not available to all students, mostly from athletic boosters. But the rule reaches back to the relationships a player makes in high school, targeting people outside the immediate family — even if a player views them as “family.” The NCAA considers it a university’s responsibility to educate athletes about the rules and self-report any past violations.

In the Indiana case, Mosquera-Perea and Jurkin were deemed to have received $9,702 and $6,003, respectively, in travel and other benefits from their AAU coach. The problem was that the coach had made modest contributions to IU’s “Varsity Club” in the 1980s and early ’90s, technically classifying him as a booster, although an NCAA official said his link to the school goes “beyond” that.

At Memphis, junior college transfer Geron Johnson was suspended for three games, the school said, for “extra benefits received … from a family friend who assisted the family with his educational expenses prior to his enrollment.”

At South Carolina, freshman Lithuanian center Laimonas Chatkevicius is serving a six-game suspension for undisclosed benefits from his U.S. host family during high school in Connecticut.

Or there’s the case of New Mexico point guard Jamal Fenton. He’s suspended three games for renting a ballroom at a discounted rate for his 21st birthday party at a local Marriott hotel, which is a UNM athletics sponsor. Documents accessed by the Albuquerque Journal under the open records act indicated the ballroom normally goes for $750 a night and Fenton got it for $500.